Webmaster, IT Professional, Sysadmin, Blogger
3 Oct 2024
I was visiting friends in the city today, nothing too exciting... until my train home at least. It was absolutely packed and I'd been hoping to upgrade to 1st class to get some peace and quiet, but this train didn't offer such luxury. In the chaos to fight my way off the train at my Reading, I must have left my wallet behind. If anyone knows where that train's journey finished it would help me flag it up at the right lost property office!
15 Sep 2024
I've been a bit overwhelmed at work and at home lately so I've spent the little free time I have exploring some of my other interests. My newest hobby is making music! I find it really relaxing and a great way to decompress after a long day. I'm really proud of my newest song, although my wife did keep distracting me while I was working on it.
10 September 2024
Life has a way of surprising us in the most incredible ways, and I'm beyond excited to share the biggest surprise of all — we've welcomed triplets into our family! Meet Percy, Parsley, and Paisley, our three little bundles of joy who have completely transformed our world. Each of them has already shown their unique personalities, and watching them grow is a joy like no other. From their first cries to their tiny, heart-melting smiles, every moment with them is a gift. The journey of raising triplets is sure to be an adventure, filled with double (and triple!) the challenges, but also triple the love, laughter, and memories.
10 September 2024
Over the past year, life has brought about some incredible changes, and I'm thrilled to share the most exciting one with you all—I got married! It's been a whirlwind of emotions, planning, and unforgettable moments that I wouldn't trade for anything. From the moment we said "yes" to each other, every day has been filled with new joys and experiences. The journey to our wedding day was beautiful, filled with laughter, a few happy tears, and the unwavering support of our loved ones.
27 Sep 2023
Some sad news! I was visiting my old university today for work and saw one of my favourite trees on campus cordoned off, with a planning application notice saying it was about to be felled. I used to love sitting under that ash tree as a student to eat my lunch. I feel I should put up a plaque or flag to remember it. If only I had the what3words address of the tree to know where it should go.
11 Oct 2022
Come link with me here!
8 Oct 2022
I went to the CASHES social last night at Orange Rooms. It was a great night, and I got to meet some new people. I'm looking forward to the next one!
25 Aug 2022
Having just enjoyed Scott Mills' and Chris Stark's last show together, I thought it would be a good time to tell you all about my recent holiday. I threw a dart at a map to choose a city and decided to explore it for a week. I had a great time and I thoroughly recommend that you guys do the same if you can. I took too many photos to show you all of them, but here's the ones I took on the Tuesday, which was my favourite day.
This final photo was that of my favourite establishment that I visited that day. Unfortunately I only took a photo of the view out of the window and I can't remember the name of it, but maybe someone reading this might be able to try and flag down the name of it for me? I hope you enjoyed my holiday photos. I'll be back soon with more content.
20 May 2022
Even more bad news guys, the situation has gone from bad to worse.
I just thought I would have to be careful about my passwords and check through all my services (still haven't yet found anything which uses my old passwords, but I'm still checking just in case there's something I've forgotten about).
My email address was also leaked and it's being attacked by spam.
This situation is so bad that I've had to change my email address.
If you're wondering what my old email was, it was account-exists@hibp-integration-tests.com.
Please don't email it though, as I've already deleted it and won't be able to read it.
I'm just really disappointed in the service that was attacked.
I've got no idea who it was, but I'd love to be able to flag down their name so I can complain and seek compensation.
3 Mar 2022
Bad news guys, I've been pwned!
It turns out that my password was leaked in a data breach, and this was before I started using different passwords for each service.
When I set up my Vaultwarden, I changed all my passwords to be unique, so I think I'm safe, but you never know if someone will be able to flag down a service I didn't change my password for.
If anyone if wondering, the password I used was password1234.
I know, not a very good password, but I was young and naive.
Just going to have to make sure that I'm more careful in the future.
5 Dec 2021
If you've ever wanted to try laser tag, book ahead. Only an imbecile would think it's a good idea to turn up without a booking. You'll thank me later.
18 Sep 2021
Today I finally got my passwords in order! I decided to setup a password manager and I'm so glad I did. It's so much easier to keep track of everything now, plus I can also store notes and files. This is so much better than using the same password for everything (I'm every sysadmin has been guilty of that at some point!). Having looked at lots of the options, I decided to go with Bitwarden as it's open source, has a great community and is free.
However, taking it a step further, I decided to self-host it on my own server as I am a sysadmin after all. There's two options to do this, if you want to do so yourself: you can either run the official Bitwarden server or you can use the popular Rust implementation, Vaultwarden. I decided to go with Vaultwarden as it's written in Rust and I'm a big fan of the language. Also, it has an admin web panel, which is really useful for changing settings on the fly, without having to SSH into my server. Although, to be honest, how often I reckon I'll actually need to use it is up for debate - I'll probably just be able to forget about it once I'm happy with how the Vaultwarden instance is setup to my liking. I just need to figure out how to store the password for the admin panel, as it feels weird to store that in the Vaultwarden itself. As a temporary measure, I've set it as a password that I can easily remember, but I'll need to change it at some point.
16 Jul 2021
A short blog entry here today, and not a technical one either. I've had a lovely week away in Scotland with my family (I won't say where it was to protect my privacy but I have attached a photo so you can see how nice it was). It's been great to just be able to take a break from the hustle and bustle of the working week and it's been great to connect again with the great outdoors. I thoroughly recommend getting a break every now and then without your phone and just enjoy the free time. Also, if you ever stay at a hotel, make sure to support a small business and leave them a review on TripAdvisor - it's great to flag how enjoyable your trip was. That's all in this short entry folks, back to work now, looking forward to my next proper blog.
8 Nov 2020
Update 2021-11-08: It turns out I accidentally left my FTP password in the screenshot and Pastebin dump below, which I've subsequently removed. Thanks to all those who alerted me to the issue.
Since my last post, a lot of you guys have gotten in touch with me, asking what my preferred method of using FTP is.
That's simple: using the command line.
When I responded to you guys, a lot of you were quite surprised.
"Why not just use a GUI, isn't it difficult to use FTP via the command line?" was a question that I was frequently asked.
Well, you may be surprised to discover that it's actually quite simple.
First, simply start FTP by running:
ftpYou can then open a connection by running and entering your connection details:
open [IP Address or Hostname]You can upload a file by running:
put [Filename]And you can download with:
get [Filename]There are loads more advanced things that you can do with FTP, but we can save that functionality for another time. Here's a sneak peek of some of the cool stuff you can do. I've uploaded a copy of my terminal screen to Pastebin, so you can copy any commands you may want to.
6 Apr 2020
As I'm sure some of you guys already know, I had to take down my personal FTP server a few months ago after we discovered some major security vulnerabilities.
Ever since, I've been scratching my head trying to find another system for securing my personal files.
I really want something technical and which I have a lot of control over, I want it to be a very cheap system, I don't want to have vendor lock in, and crucially I want something that I can integrate in well with all my existing apps and scripts.
My first thought was to go for something like a NAS Drive.
This would allow me to run it locally on my home network and I'd still have control over it.
However, this was quite expensive, I'd still have some security considerations to deal with and I'd also need to deal with hardware failure.
So I then looked at possibly using something like Google Drive or Dropbox.
As a store I lot of files, however, this would add up to be very expensive for me over the course of my lifetime.
And it would be a pain to script with as they don't have decent APIs.
However, just when everything looked like a dead end, a friend suggested that I look into cloud hosted FTP servers.
It wasn't something that had crossed my mind but very quickly it looked like something really simple that I could try.
Instead of paying extortionate rates to Google or Dropbox, I'd be paying for the commercial value of the cloud storage, plus a small maintenance fee.
It would still be secure as it would be a managed instance, so all security would be dealt with by the hosting provider.
And since it would still be FTP, I would barely have to modify my existing scripts.
I've been using this for a few months now and it's great.
I completely recommend it to anyone who is looking for a new file storage solution.
7 Oct 2019
Some exciting news to share with you folks - I've got a new job! I'm pleased to announced that I am the new Webmaster at Secure A Tea. The team have been so welcoming and I'm excited to start a new chapter in my life. I look forward to sharing with you all the new insights that I learn in this new and exciting position.
20 Sep 2019
The world of self hosting can be cool, right?
Being able to have all of your remote code running of your own infrastructure, which can be managed and audited by yourself is a pretty nice idea.
You can even save on expensive cloud computing or SaaS costs in the process if you've got existing hardware that can be repurposed.
It's no wonder then that everyone wants to get in on the act, even Hilary Clinton.
However, unfortunately this also comes with hidden costs.
All of a sudden, you are responsible for everything: security, reliability, maintenance, backups and so much more.
Have you got a strict firewall setup, are you protected against DDOS attacks, are you on top of all the security patches that are gonna come your way, have you planned for a hard disk failure, are you doing local and offsite backups?
And what if one day you want to run for President of the United States?
At work we thought it would be a great idea to self host our own FTP server.
It went so well, I went ahead and setup on my own FTP server for private use.
Unfortunately, very quickly we found it wasn't all going smoothly.
The FTP server we used was riddled of bugs which needed constant patching.
It was also horribly unreliable and couldn't stand up to our usage requirements.
And then the bombshell dropped.
The kind folks at BIC Biro's Pen Testing Team alerted us that our server infrastructure was severely insecure and we had to take it offline.
This has caused severe disruption to the operation of our business and we are desperately looking for alternatives for our file storage needs.
I have also disabled my personal FTP server as it used the same setup as our work one.
In short, be careful when it comes to self hosting.
Make sure you fully understand what you're taking on before you start.
It can be a fairy tale dream if done right, however, it can also end up being a horror story nightmare if it does wrong.
15 Sep 2019
Why are passwords so hard to remember? They are the bane of my life, so hard to type and so easy to forget. I, as a sysadmin, of course have secure passwords for all of my accounts. But I can't blame people for using bad passwords. If I was to have children, I would definitely be so filled with love for them that I would want to start using my favorite child;s name as all my future passwords. Anyways, thats a future problem for me to deal with.